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More important than adding square footage to the museum, though, the project provided an opportunity for the city to secure its own version of the Bilbao effect: Hire a fancy architect to design a visually stunning, architecturally iconoclastic cultural institution, and scores of tourists will follow. Or as Daniel Libeskind, the architect selected for the expansion, unceremoniously put it in The New York Times in 2006: “They [Denver] have an ambition to not just be a cow town in the Rockies.”

The Bilbao effect takes its name from the tourists who have flocked to the Spanish city of Bilbao, where the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum opened in 1997. The voluptuous titanium museum transformed the once-industrial city into a sleek urban center; and a decade after it opened, the museum still attracts 1 million visitors each year. As a result, over the past decade cities from Cincinnati to Fort Worth have erected dramatic buildings with the hope that they will provide a similar shot in the urban arm.